Spotlights

The City of Cardiff Council makes significant technology investment to deliver better services for the community and reduce long-term costs

April 30, 2015 by SAP News
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April 30, 2015 by SAP News

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SAP Cloud helps Cardiff Council manage budget pressures, improve business processes and better serve an increasingly young population

Feltham — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) has partnered with The City of Cardiff Council (Cardiff Council) in a digital transformation project to move its IT systems into the cloud over the next three years. The scheme is set to dramatically improve customer services, streamline Council processes and deliver significant cost savings. Primarily implemented by SAP, the project will support the Council’s 15,000-strong workforce across almost all functions helping to enhance Council services by modernising IT infrastructure and ultimately delivering better customer experiences.

Cardiff is the fastest growing city in the UK outside of London and is expected to expand by 26 per cent within the next 20 years. With over 40,000 students, it is also Europe’s youngest capital while also attracting nearly 80,000 commuters on a daily basis. These trends have placed ever-increasing demands on services. Despite this the Council is facing £124 million in budget cuts over the next three years and sees technology solutions as an important component of its efforts to manage costs, reduce expenditure and meet the needs of a growing, youthful population.

“For local authorities like Cardiff Council, finding ways to minimise costs is their number one priority. Coupled with a young, digitally-advanced demographic, the Council has taken a bold approach to meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges,” said Cormac Watters, Managing Director, SAP UK and Ireland. “We are really excited that Cardiff Council’s use of our Cloud for Customer solutions will enable the organisation to work in a far more integrated and connected way. But critically it will also support the delivery of new digital services geared to the highly-connected user, providing greater choice, more self-service options, better access and flexibility, resulting in improved user adoption and unlocking cost savings at every turn. This is essential at a time when budgets are under substantial pressure.”

A cloud solution for better collaboration and enhanced servicesOne of the main challenges faced by Cardiff Council is that its legacy on-premise IT system does not allow for collaboration across Council services and functions, leading to inefficiencies and duplications. Working with SAP the Council was able to identify the factors that would generate cost efficiencies, improve integration and deliver better services to residents and partners, such as online access and greater flexibility.

Using SAP’s Cloud for Customer solutions together with the HANA Cloud Platform, Cardiff Council plans to create a digital self-service portal that will enable residents to interact online quickly rather than in-person, greatly reducing administrative costs. It’s also designed to ease adoption and appeal to the increasingly young population in Cardiff, with an intuitive user interface that mirrors omni-channel, modern e-commerce experiences. Self-service and more efficient call handling will be critical in helping the Council to meet local government directives, while improving customer satisfaction. With SAP, the Council’s self-service portal will be integrated into the CRM system and backend platforms, providing a consistent view of the customer journey between channels – call centre, online or in-person – that will significantly reduce call handling times and improve customer satisfaction.

“The public service mandate of ‘do more with less’ is not going away, but for us, it’s an opportunity to bring our thriving city into the digital age in a way that will bring us long-term financial savings” said Ross Maude, Senior Enterprise Architect, Cardiff Council. “The services we provide are important for everyone from the elderly, to university students and public sector workers, and ensuring we’re still able to maintain the level and quality of service we have today despite our financial pressures is crucial. Our relationship with SAP means that together we’re able to implement an integrated cloud-based solution that brings all of our systems together allows us to focus on the growing needs of Cardiff residents.”
In addition, the fully integrated solution will enable the council to gain a far deeper understanding of the community’s needs through enhanced data analytics, resulting in better and more informed business decisions. By accessing this neighborhood data the platform will provide far richer reporting systems for staff, which will help to drive further Page 2

efficiencies across the organisation. The cloud solution will also enable partners and agencies to work more easily with the Council, supporting collaboration, and ultimately, benefiting Cardiff’s residents.
Cardiff Council has already started to implement these solutions and will continue to work with SAP throughout the process to ensure a successful roll-out by 2018.

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